BRITISH TRAINED FOR AGGRESSIVE ACTION

Southland Times, Issue 24339, 21 January 1941, Page 5

BRITISH TRAINED FOR AGGRESSIVE ACTION

(British Official Wireless) RUGBY, January 19. In a broadcast tonight a young officer, who is himself in training, described how the British Army is undergoing training in what it would be correct to call “aggressive action.” This training, he said, meant acquiring rigid parade ground discipline and the learning of self-discipline and selfreliance which was the basis of courage and of the offensive spirit. He described how these troops were proving themselves and how they could do more than their bodies admitted. They had marched 25 miles in six or seven hours with a full load and had immediately followed it with another 14 or 20 miles, finishing with a quarter of an hour’s small arms drill. They had tried to go across country like a trained hunter, they had learned to climb or to jump off anything up to a 20-foot wall, to go long periods without food or sleep and not to notice wet or cold or cuts or bruises. “There is no way out of anything we have set ourselves to do except its completion,” he said. “This is our promise to you, to our mothers, wives and sisters, who are being bombed in the big cities,” he concluded. “To the Wren churches, the wrecked hospitals and the inoffensive little homes which are now heaps of rubble it is our promise of retribution.”